Gov. Brown signs gun-control bills

California’s reputation as a state with a shockingly large number of regulations has been embellished by the 930 new bills it passed this year. Gov. Jerry Brown must suffer carpal tunnel syndrome from signing so many of the bills the past week, while vetoing a few. Two signed:

AB1014 allows family members, friends and others to get an order from a judge to remove the guns of someone accused of mental illness. This is sure to be challenged in court on Second Amendment gun-rights grounds and on Fourth Amendment “unreasonable searches and seizures” grounds.

It also will add costs to city police departments. These guns will not be seized by Sgt. Joe Friday with his .38 service revolver, but by expensive SWAT teams. Relatives also should realize that when a SWAT team comes to grab Cousin Freddie’s guns, they will ransack your entire house looking for them.

Moreover, the definition of who is “crazy” is nebulous. Psychiatry depends on the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” which keeps changing. The book was critiqued in “The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry,” by psychotherapist Gary Greenberg. From the summary:

“Since its debut in 1952, the book has been frequently revised, and with each revision, the “official” view on which psychological problems constitute mental illness. Homosexuality, for instance, was a mental illness until 1973, and Asperger’s gained recognition in 1994 only to see its status challenged nearly twenty years later. Each revision has created controversy, but the DSM-5, the newest iteration, has shaken psychiatry to its foundations. The APA has taken fire from patients, mental health practitioners, and former members for extending the reach of psychiatry into daily life by encouraging doctors to diagnose more illnesses and prescribe more therapies—often medications whose efficacy is unknown and whose side effects are severe. Critics—including Greenberg—argue that the APA should not have the naming rights to psychological pain or to the hundreds of millions of dollars the organization earns, especially when even the DSM’s staunchest defenders acknowledge that the disorders listed in the book are not real illnesses.”

Yet it is the DSM-5 that will be brought forth to a judge as “evidence” that someone’s Second Amendment rights should be violated by a SWAT team.

BB gun markings

SB 199 requires BB guns to have bright markings. According to the Los Angeles Airport Peace Officers Association, which backed the bill:

“Imitation guns are deliberately fabricated to be indistinguishable from real firearms. Law enforcement officers have extreme difficulty distinguishing these fake guns from lethal weapons, particularly when officers must react within seconds to emergency situations. One of the primary dangers posed by replicas is that such guns are used by children and young adults who may not comprehend the seriousness of displaying them around unsuspecting law enforcements officers or around armed individuals. As a result, officers and community residents can find themselves
in precarious situations when unable to distinguish replica guns from handguns and assault weapons.

“On October 22, 2013, a thirteen-year-old boy from Santa Rosa was tragically shot and killed by Sonoma County deputies who mistook the plastic airsoft gun he was carrying for an actual AK-47. This tragedy is neither new nor uncommon. A 1990 study commissioned by the Department of Justice found that there are well over 200 incidents per year in which imitation guns are mistaken for real firearms.”

That’s in a vast country of more than 300 million people. And instead of this legislation, why not legislation requiring more training by police to tell the difference between a BB gun and an AK-47?

Have the authors of this bill, and Gov. Brown, ever been young boys? When I was a kid back in the 1960s and my parents got me a BB gun, there’s no way I would have accepted one with bright markings. Or I would have spray-painted it black.

My favorite TV show in the early 1960s (before “Start Trek” in 1966) was “Combat.” My brother and I imitated the GIs fighting numerous Nazi troops, blasting our way to Berlin. Our heroes, Sgt. Carter, Lt. Hanley, Caje, Doc, Kirby and Littlejohn, didn’t defeat Hitler using brightly colored guns, so neither did we.

Full episodes are here on YouTube.

The bill also won’t prevent kids from importing the guns from other states. Has Gov. Brown heard of Internet shopping? Here’s one listed on Amazon: